Eat Pray Love - the book that started it all

Millions relate to one woman’s 'bathroom floor moment’.

American writer Elizabeth Gilbert begins her memoir, Eat Pray Love with a vivid description of her crying alone on the bathroom floor. She is married to the wrong man (who is asleep next door in their bedroom), has found herself on the repressive suburban baby track and is living a seemingly perfect life that she doesn’t want.

Those bathroom-floor moments are a rite of passage for the thirtysomething brigade (mine, thankfully, came before I got married).

With that image of a terribly private moment, the author captured the attention of a huge female book-buying audience in the United States and beyond. Gilbert, a journalist and author based in New York, is 34 at the time the book is set.

As her crisis plays out, she appeals to God (“It was all I could do to stop myself from saying, 'I’ve always been a big fan of your work’,” she writes), divorces her husband, has a doomed affair and leaves for a year of self-discovery and healing. “I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two,” she writes.

Published in 2006, Eat Pray Love has sold seven million copies, and been translated into 30 languages. Julia Roberts snapped up the film rights early on. There is a perfume based on the book, a jewellery line, package holidays based on Gilbert’s route, and the places and people she visited that year are under siege from women from across the world eager to follow in the writer’s footsteps.

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There has, of course, been a backlash. Gilbert has been branded silly and self-indulgent and a parody was published last year called, Drink Play F@#k: One Man’s Search for Anything Across Ireland, Las Vegas and Thailand.

None the less, Gilbert managed to capture the attention of seven million, mostly female, readers. How did she do it? Firstly, the tone of Gilbert’s writing was at the heart of the book’s success. Gilbert is instantly likeable as a narrator: she’s warm, funny and, as she says, can make friends with anyone, anywhere. That included her readers who have become cult-like devotees.

Before anyone could have known it would become a phenomenon The New York Times wrote in its 2006 review of the book: “If a more likeable writer than Gilbert is currently in print, I haven’t found him or her… she’s really, really nice. Gilbert’s prose is fuelled by a mix of intelligence, wit and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible, and makes the reader only too glad to join the posse of friends and devotees who have the pleasure of listening in.”

Then there was the book’s simple structure: 108 sections, representing the number of beads in a japa mala or strand of prayer beads – an idea that came to Gilbert while meditating in India. Those sections were then divided into three groups to represent each country she visited.

And we mustn’t forget Oprah Winfrey. The talk-show host has an unprecedented hold on the publishing industry in the US. A book mentioned on her show (which has about 23 million viewers each week) becomes an overnight bestseller. Winfrey pioneered Gilbert’s story of female empowerment and spiritual discovery from the outset and has had her on the show several times.

But, irrespective of Winfrey’s endorsement, there will always be something endlessly appealing about the idea of throwing in the towel and starting all over again. Likewise, any tale addressing the search for love and human happiness is always going to have an audience.

While Eat Pray Love is no rival to Anna Karenina, the heart of Gilbert’s story is universal. As Gilbert writes: “I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, 'There are only two questions that humans have ever fought over, all through history: how much do you love me? And, who’s in charge?’”

Being thirtysomething and living in New York myself, I have many friends who have done what Gilbert has done.

One has just divorced her husband of 10 years and left indefinitely to ride horses across Spain and Portugal. Another has sought the advice of a guru in Costa Rica and submitted to a month-long silent retreat. Yet another sought solace in a yoga retreat following the break-up of her marriage and another spent four months in a Nepalese ashram.

Personally, I blame yoga. The go-to exercise class for spiritually starved urban dwellers has a lot to answer for in all this. My yoga teacher the other day talked about tapping into our inner bliss. I suppressed my British knee-jerk reaction to laugh and decided a bit of inner bliss would feel rather nice. The ideas of “finding oneself” (where else would one be?), “balance”, “groundedness” and “centredness” have all entered the mainstream. Call it the commodification of spiritual enlightenment, if you will. Lulu Lemon, an American yoga clothing store, is worth $2.5 billion.

“I’m there, sister, I’m having an Eat Pray Love experience as we speak,” one recently divorced, successful fortysomething New York woman told me. “One thing Elizabeth Gilbert did successfully was to identify what wasn’t working, figure out a way to find her balance, and overcome her fear to love again. In real life, that requires courage, strength and focus. But she did have her spiritual healer… I would love a healer to help me right now.”

However navel-gazing this all might be, the appeal of Gilbert’s journey keeps building. For anyone who has ever cried on the bathroom floor, she is saying to her fans, there is hope.